Tag Archives: 5.4

Last week Blizzard made a hotfix nerf to demonology with a whopping 30% reduced Wild Imp damage and a 40% reduced chance for the trinket Unerring Vision of Lei Shen (UVLS) to proc for Warlocks only.

These nerfs were very justified and have been needed for the class to stay from getting out of hand with UVLS. However the Warlock community on various forum websites didnt quite see the nerfs the way I did and have been raging, QQing and crying endlessly about these nerfs saying things such as “well there goes demo as a viable raiding spec” claiming the players would feel forced into affliction in order to perform to their maximum potential.

While the argument and worry about feeling pigeonholed into a single spec for raiding is perfectly valid, just crying and complaining gets you nowhere.

Bad nerfs for a good cause.

To be honest, I was really unhappy about these nerfs, not in the QQ/rage way, but in a “this nerf is far too punishing and hurts all of demo, with or without UVLS” way. I understand that Demo needed a nerf and UVLS is a stupidly over powered trinket, but I feel like the nerf to wild imps was taking it too far.

Wild Imps are a very large source of demonology’s damage, even without UVLS spawning an army of them. So, while I like that with the 30% nerf Imps are no longer the largest majority source of damage the issue is that Demonology has been given nothing to compensate for that large loss in DPS.

Essentially, the nerfs for imps are a method of making UVLS increasingly less attractive, but in the process it is hurting players without UVLS, taking a fairly competitive spec without the trinket into a spec desired mostly for it’s strong burst AoE damage.

UVLS, the undying.

So in my raid tonight I thought I should test out demo with UVLS now that nerfs are in place. And I was surprised with the results: I felt like there had been absolutely no change to UVLS, but the nerf to imps was really noticeable. Where I normally would have been at 150k on single target, I was barely getting 120k with my imps doing 15% of my damage still. Not exactly what I would have liked to have seen.

While I don’t have exact numbers and I am only going off personal experience on a single target encounter, I have a feeling UVLS will pull ahead over other ToT trinkets, but the raw damage output of certain Siege trinkets may over take UVLS.

Judging from my personal results it’s pretty clear UVLS needs to either have it’s proc changed, not affect dots or something I haven’t thought of. Though there is the chance that if they buffed demo’s single target spells then that could cause raw int proc trinkets to become more valuable – buffing spells like Soul Fire could end up resulting in higher DPS with another trinket vs UVLS.

I apologise if this blog makes no sense in it’s structure, grammar or otherwise, but such is the way of an amateur writing late at night.